“Can surf early tomorrow,” Lani says. “Mean da swell, yeah.” Australia’s eastern coast has seen record storm activity in the past week, and the newscasters claim that the weather system is finally headed north. We’re giddy with the promise of six-foot faces on the south shore.
“Let’s check the water before we head home,” Mel suggests.
We leave behind the club and Kūhiō Avenue, with its explosion of car horns and police sirens, men hawking coupons for an indoor shooting range—half off for women!—and prostitutes whispering “Aloha” in lilting voices. When we reach the beach, the night is suddenly quiet, and we breathe deeply of the salt air. In the distance, the waves at Pops are gilded by moonlight, and we watch them rise and lumber along, slow and unambitious. By the morning we want them stacking up clean and high.
We pause outside the Banyan Hotel, the warm light from the lobby casting our shadows across the water’s edge. The tide sucks at the sand beneath our toes like a vacuum. We look into the hotel, and we can almost understand why here, in Waikīkī, the world appears perfect. The hotel lobbies are brimming with flower arrangements and sticky with the scent of ginger. The island air is warm and heavy as a blanket. And the people are beautiful. Tan and healthy, with muscles carved from koa wood and cheeks the color of strawberry guava. These people—our people—look fresh as cut fruit, ready to be caressed, to be admired. These are people to be trusted. This is not New York or Los Angeles. No, Hawaiʻi is heaven. A dream.
Not far from us, we hear someone moan, and we giggle. A girl says, “No,” and we take a step in the direction of the voice. But her husky voice is muffled, and in the next moment we think we hear an excited “Oh.” We stop. We see this all the time. Tourist couples think the beach is some private fantasy island. Like no one can see them out there, when they’re about as hidden from view as mating monk seals. How many times have we glimpsed naked ass, white as moonlight, pumping away for all it’s worth?
We think of all the tourist women who have come here and taken a man to bed with them—or the men who have taken women. Are they proud of themselves, these tourists? Do they feel they’ve acquired the most exotic souvenir, or that they are now true islanders?
Our mood gets heavy fast. We tell each other to loosen up. Tomorrow the surf will be high and we’ll wash away all these questions in the water. We start to walk back to the street. We pause when we hear splashing nearby and a small, thrilled shriek, but when we look down the beach all we see are shadows staining the sand.
For the first time since we were college kids, we dream of the rolling ocean. Not of boardrooms or courtrooms, classrooms or meeting rooms, but of waves, of room, as much as we can bear, and the space of the sea. We dream we are falling deep into the ocean. At first the water is warm, comforting even, but suddenly we are scared. We can’t find our way up or out. We need air, and none exists beneath the weight of all this water. We hear a woman screaming for help, and we’re not sure if the voice is ours or someone else’s.
When we awake, our quilts are kicked to the foot of our beds. Kiana has balled her sheet in her hand. Esther’s pillowcase is clammy with sweat. Jason takes Paula in his arms, presses her tear-dampened face to his shoulder, and tells her that everything will be okay.
But we don’t think everything is okay. Something is amiss, muddled. Years have passed since we listened to our dreams, since we were youthful enough to trust them. Now we take the time to hear ourselves. In the quiet of our bedrooms, we finally fall back asleep, but we remain just below the surface of waking, afraid to again sink completely into sleep.
We’re on the early shift again, so we arrive at five in the morning. We begin by dusting the surfaces in the lobby, vacuuming up the sand guests have tracked in, sweeping the patio—which the busboys for the Banyan Bar will later sweep again—and polishing all the metal fixtures and lampshades. The front desk signs the delivery slip for the arrangement of birds of paradise and centers the vase on the round wooden table in the middle of the lobby. Always birds of paradise, their pointed beaks threatening to stab the first woman who tries to dust the table. Today the stems are unusually long, and the flower heads sink wearily.
As soon as we finish with the common areas, we are supposed to load our room carts and ride the elevator to our assigned floors. But first we always slip away to glimpse the ocean in the first rays of sunlight. The sky is still dark in the west, but the horizon near Diamond Head is blooming with a pale yellow light. We cross the veranda, drawn by this soft glow, and descend to the patio. Even though we are facing east, toward mainland America, we pretend that in the distance, beyond the white haze that hangs above the ocean, lie our home islands. We don’t like to think of ourselves as homesick, but sometimes we feel an ache for their still, quiet air.
We kneel to roll a few grains of sand between our fingers. Here, the sand is soft and fine, imported from beaches on Maui and Kauaʻi. This sand feels fake to us, unlike the coarser sand of our islands, the sand that, like us, is whole and hardened. We stand and glance up again at the horizon, admire the white-yellow of the sky, and this is when we see her.
She is lying on her side, her right arm tucked beneath her ear, her back turned to us. People sleep out on this beach all the time: drifters, druggies, drunks, runaways, lovers, and tourists too lost or high to care if they make it back to their hotels. We’re not sure if we should disturb her, but something in the absolute stillness of her body makes us move toward her. Up close, we see that her hair is stringy and wet, and her dress hem has slid halfway up her left butt cheek. Stassi Nifon tugs on the hem to cover her nakedness, but we are still embarrassed for the girl.
We lean over her and place our hands on the wet cotton of her dress. We shake her gently. “Wake up,” we tell her. “It’s morning.” She doesn’t stir. She is heavy in our hands. We command her to get up, to move, but she doesn’t listen. When we touch her bare arm, her skin is cold. We jump away from her, startled. Her skin is too cold.
A couple of us run to tell management. Those who hesitated to leave the patio now retreat to the housekeeping office, not wishing to be involved. But those who found her, who touched her, who recognize her—we stay. We form a circle around her, protecting her even though she is beyond our protection. When management comes running to verify the police are needed, we remain where we are. Our shift leader tells us to go back inside, but we ignore her. Management withdraws to the hotel.
The girl’s hair and skin are pale as the sky at sunrise. She is older than even our eldest girls, and, on any other day, we could have called her haole, foreigner, a white woman independent and capable of caring for herself. But in these few minutes before the police come running down the beach with a first-aid kit and walkie-talkie, this girl is a child. She is helpless. She is in need of a mother, and that’s a job at which we are experts. The sky lightens in the west to a dull blue as flares of orange rip the eastern sky. We are here, we tell the unmoving girl. All us mothers are here.
We’ve just turned the corner at the snack stand when we spot the crowd gathered outside of the Banyan Hotel. “Can jus’ surf Canoes,” Lani says, pointing to the break in front of us. “No crowd dere yet.”
“Bet it’s a turtle on the beach,” Cora yawns. She presses the heel of her palm to her left temple. We’re all a little ragged this morning, from lack of sleep and one too many margaritas. “Turtles always bring out the tourists. No one’s in the water.” We cross the sand, its cold granules clumping between our toes.
As we draw closer to the crowd, we see police uniforms and hear the odd burst of voice and crackled silence particular to walkie-talkies. The hotel’s housekeeping staff, identifiable by their floral-patterned dresses and white tennis shoes, are taking turns being interviewed by a couple of officers. When each interview is complete, the women are pointed in the direction of the hotel, but they refuse to leave the beach. Instead, they return in silence to the circle their compatriots have formed. The women stand sentinel, very still and very tall
. A man in a black windbreaker tries to take photographs of whatever is inside their circle, but each time he asks the housekeeping women to move or attempts to nudge them aside, they block his way. Finally, he gives up and takes his photos in the narrow spaces between the women’s bodies. We’re past the the hotel’s patio before we realize the back of the photographer’s jacket reads “Coroner’s Office.”
Mel turns to one of the housekeepers and asks quietly, “Auntie, what happened?”
The woman glances toward the ground shaking her head, and we glimpse a maroon dress, white legs, a half-closed hand. We run to the other side of the circle to see the face, and even when the police yell, “ ’Ey, get ’em outta hea!” we refuse to budge.
Lani, as always, is the first to speak. “We know her,” she says. Her voice is heavy with wonder and shock.
We know her, we repeat. We know her and we warned her and we saw him. Cora shakes her head in disbelief. Mel looks sick.
The police officers frown at us in disbelief or annoyance, but one of them, a petite woman with dark skin and a protruding belly, yells at the rest, “Why are you staring at them? Do something.” She’s older than the other officers, and they defer to her. At first, they tell us to pile our boards on the sand and not go anywhere, but then they wander away to watch the coroner or manage the growing crowd. A couple of us sigh heavily and we stare out at Pops. We’ll miss dawn patrol, we think. And then we’re ashamed for being so crass. We’d like to turn off our minds. We’d like to think only of Susan, of her smile when she thanked us for the drink, of the eagerness in her eyes. We’d like to cry, if for no other reason than to prove to ourselves that we are empathetic humans, but we have no tears for her. We’re already wondering if we’ll make it to work on time, what we should eat for lunch, whether the surf will still be good in the afternoon and not blown out by the winds. Already our lives are moving on, forward, into the future, and Susan’s life has been left behind on this beach.
The policewoman follows our gaze with her eyes and watches the waves with us. For a moment, we’re all looking at the ocean with the same longing, the same sense of hurling through time and space. She approaches us. “If we talk now, you all should still have time for a short session,” she whispers, smiling gently.
We relax. We can trust her. We’ll make it into the ocean after all. With sudden clarity, we remember hearing splashing in the water the night before and a woman’s scream. We hadn’t thought it anything more than a shriek of laughter.
“I tink we heard one scream last night,” Cora begins. At the same moment, Lani cuts in with “She neva like listen.”
The policewoman pulls out a pad of paper. She looks at all of us at once. “Girls, let’s start at the beginning.”
By the time Paula conference calls us on our office lines we’ve already watched the early news. We tell her the police sketch looks just like him, that man with Susan. We have learned the girl’s name and now we use it. Susan. It makes us feel as if we’re helping her.
Paula tells us a group of surfer girls contributed to the artist’s sketch, which Paula personally approved. “Just like how we saw him,” she says, echoing the rest of us. Her voice is hollow over the phone, and we know what she’s thinking: We’re older and more experienced than the Susans of the world. We’re career women. We should have seen that Susan was getting herself into trouble. We should have done something.
“What about the brother?” Kiana asks as if to divert attention from herself, or ourselves.
“He returned to the hotel not long after we all went home,” Paula says. “He figured they had gone out to a club or something. He didn’t think to go looking for his sister. He felt like, if he gave her space, he was helping her out.”
“What was he thinking?” Laura asks.
“He wasn’t,” Kiana says, sighing.
“If my boy left his sister alone in a hotel room with some …” Paula stops herself.
We wonder how many days will pass before someone comes forward with information on the suspect. On an island like ours, a man doesn’t run. Can’t run. The airlines have his sketches, the ships as well, though we’ve never heard of a suspect trying to escape via Carnival Cruise Lines. On island, a man has to hide, hunker down, find friends and use them. The question is not how will he be caught, but who will turn him in.
We don’t tell each other about our dreams, but we hint at them. Last night I barely slept, we say, or I was awake all night thinking about that girl. In the early morning, alone in our apartments and condos and houses, when the only sounds were the winds sweeping out of the valleys and a dog barking in the distance, we found ourselves wondering how we escaped those treacherous years of our late teens and early twenties. We lived in a different time, we tell each other, and the world suddenly appears fragile and sad.
Esther says Hawaiʻi is becoming more and more like the mainland, and for once we don’t hear anger in her voice, just regret.
But Laura is angry. “If you were in Chicago, would you go home with a man you just met at a bar? Would you trust a stranger with your hotel key in L.A.?”
“If I was young, maybe, and on vacation,” Kiana answers.
“How young?” Laura challenges. “This woman, this Susan, she was twenty-two. She should have known better!”
Paula interrupts. “Laura, at that age we hardly knew any better.”
“I knew better.”
Paula offers a hollow laugh. “I visited you at college. I saw the risks you were willing to take in those days. Inviting guys back to your apartment, getting into cars with friends of friends of friends. You didn’t know those guys any better than Susan knew this man.”
Laura is quiet.
“Back then we all were that way,” Esther says gently. “We were young, naive.”
Laura’s sadness radiates across the phone lines, and we shiver. “So were we just lucky?”
Throughout the day we argue over Susan, acting as if we knew her enough to speak for her. Some of us claim she was all over that Bryan at the Lava Lounge. Others say she was too innocent to know what he was really after. Cora tries to find a middle ground: “Maybe she wanted to hook up but didn’t want to sleep with him, and he got mad.”
We watch the news on television, wanting to know the latest updates. Two hotel security guards are interviewed. They say they saw a couple rolling in the sand. “Two lovers,” they claim, but when pressed, they admit it could have been a struggle. “All da time we see tings like dat, but,” they tell the reporters. We feel disgust with Security. Why didn’t they investigate? Why didn’t they interrupt? We think of the noises we heard and we ask ourselves the same questions.
In the late afternoon, we hear that the hotel is going to sponsor a small remembrance ceremony and that more than one hundred people plan on attending, mostly locals. Our community has been shaken. We want to give something, but we don’t know what or to whom. Susan’s family has already stated, via a lawyer, that they will not be present at the ceremony. They know none of us, so they mourn alone. We feel sorry for them. We are angry at them. When they see local people, they must think we are the ones who brought them death.
Us girls buy white plumeria lei at Safeway and put them around our necks. We meet on the beach in front of the Banyan, but we don’t stay for the ceremony. Instead, we paddle out to Pops, past the break and into deep water until we are far from any other surfers. We sit on our boards and form a tight circle, our knees bumping into the rails of the boards on either side of us, and we pule, we pray. We ask forgiveness. We ask for patience. We ask for guidance, not only for our lives but also for Susan’s family, and for the islands. Then we chew through the strings of our lei and toss each flower into the center of the circle. The strings we tie around our wrists.
We begin the long paddle back to land. The flowers are still there when we glance behind, sunlight reflecting off their white petals like small lanterns on the surface of the water.
By the time we return to shore, the
beach is filled again with its usual sunbathers and swimmers. All that’s left of the remembrance ceremony is a confused jumble of magenta orchids and red carnations, pale pink roses toppling over green ti leaf, orange birds of paradise sticking out like cheap sparklers. We stand over the pile and look down. The setting sun is hot on the back of our necks, and in the heat all the flowers are wilting.
WANLE
Hawaiʻi is a cock-pit, on the ground the well-fed cocks fight.
—FROM THE CHANT OF HAUI-KA-LANI
The Indian said “Poi Dog” the way other men say Princess or Babydoll. He always said it real sweet, as if he didn’t know the meaning, didn’t know a poi dog was a mutt, the kind of dog that finds you and not the kind you breed special. Even in bed, naked and chilled, waiting for the damp air of the valley to rise around us in ghostly mist, he’d whisper, “Poi Dog,” and I’d tuck my head beneath his neck to feel his breath hot on my cheek.
I called him the Indian. I didn’t mean it bad or good. I just called things what they were, as my father had before me. My dad was the one who named me “Wanle,” which he said in Chinese means “It is gone.” He claimed, after I was born, his fears left him. “Dey all wen go away,” he’d say. “Oh, and yoa mudda. It wen go away, too.”
Every morning, even before the roosters awoke, the Indian started banging pans around in the kitchen. When I smelled frying eggs, I knew it was time to climb out of bed and fix breakfast for my boys. I measured their food carefully, mashing together a quarter pound of raw ground beef, two chicken eggs, three tablespoons of vitamin powder, and four teaspoons of fish oil for omega-3s. I divided the mixture into two aluminum pie tins and added extra cornmeal to one of the dishes. The cornmeal was to help bulk up my two blacks. My hatches, who fought with their speed and agility rather than brute strength, didn’t need any extra weight.
This Is Paradise Page 3